Can Psychoanalysis Save Family Life?

Family Life, from the psychological point of view, is not just a vague description of parents and children living under the same roof but refers to a system which has certain essential dynamics.

Just as the physical development and health of children depend on being protected, fed and cared for, healthy emotional development can only happen if the child has enough of certain important types of experience. These principally involve adequate mothering in the early years, and the experience of the relationship of the parents as protective, containing anxiety and able to generate love and concern.

However, although most of the world would still agree with these general ideas, it is not at all clear what the essential ingredients are. Although babies and young children clearly need mothering, it has long been recognised that this can often be adequately provided by someone who is not the biological mother – and need not even be a woman. Children in stable, single-parent families may turn out far better than children who grow up in a dysfunctional family with a mother and father who remain together. The family system can be thought of like an emotional ecosystem where it is not at all evident what is vital. Consequently, interfering with the system in any radical way, without any real understanding of how it works, can cause serious problems and may even lead to a total collapse.

A number of things have conspired to erode family life in the Western world over the last few decades. A key one was, no doubt, the advent of reliable contraception so that sexuality ceased to be thought of as something primarily concerned with having children. Sex became widely considered to be a recreational activity as opposed to an intimate form of emotional contact. Once sex lost its meaning in this way it became empty and boring. “Vanilla Sex” needed to be spiced up by perversion, massively accelerated by the capacity of the Internet to provide pornography. Commercial pressures made it increasingly necessary for most parents to go out to work so that it had become more and more common for the parenting of children to be subcontracted to nurseries and childminders.

Although there has been a massive increase in emotional disturbance, learning problems and even mental illness in the child population, there seems to be an inability (or perhaps resistance) to ask whether this is being caused by the erosion of the family system. This is an inconvenient truth from which the world shies away. Working psychoanalytically with families and couples as well as in individual analysis, my clinical impression is that the damage to the family system is reaching critical proportions and may soon be irreversible. I and my colleagues seem to see more and more people between the ages of twenty and forty who do not suffer from serious pathology but are completely unable to form and sustain intimate, personal relationships, as a result of being essentially emotional orphans.

Let’s take a couple of brief examples:

Millie, now 41, lived at home as a child with her parents, but virtually had to bring herself up. She discovered that the years her father spent abroad, supposedly “on business” were actually when he was in prison for fraud. Apparently made to leave home at the age of 16, totally unprepared and unsupported, she became an alcoholic and a junkie. Amazingly, she managed to get free of her addictions without professional help but was left badly scarred. For one thing, she just doesn’t like people, although you never guess it to talk to her.

Meta is 17 and was referred to the mental health services because she was so depressed and withdrawn at school. She persuaded her father to find a private therapist for her because her counsellors in the health service were so unreliable. Meta’s parents are in the throes of a protracted divorce. She lives with her mother who is completely preoccupied with selling the house so that she can buy another one with her new boyfriend in a city in another part of the country. Her mother only ever seems to speak to her to demand housework and assistance, apparently oblivious of the fact that Meta is in the middle of taking crucial, final exams which will decide where she gets a place at university. She is given no money by either parent for her personal needs and when she gets a part-time job, her mother demands she give her some of her earnings because father has been defaulting on the alimony payments. In a quiet, resigned voice, one day Meta says “my Mum does not know who she is. She is completely lost unless she has a man to hang onto.” What strikes me is not just the accuracy of this assessment (as far as I can judge from the circumstances) but Meta’s maturity. Her thoughts about relationships reflect a remarkable degree of sensitivity and objectivity. Like so many young people I see, there is a role-reversal: the parents behave like self-centred, small children, while the actual children function as long-suffering parents. I feel that the main thing I can do to respond to Meta is to point out how confusing this role-reversal is for her and how important it is that she understands the value of experiencing reliable parents in the form of the analysis and me.

It might be naïvely hoped that the problem might be recognised by health, education and social care departments and that as a result, government policies and initiatives could be expected to remedy the situation. Sadly, not only is this not the case, but these agencies, and particularly the politicians in charge, seem to be hellbent on making the situation worse. For a start, any politician who does not enthusiastically support childcare and pre-school education forever younger age groups is not likely to get many votes. As far as family life goes, it would be no exaggeration to say that (in Britain at any rate) the family and marriage itself are under sustained attack. Tolerance of differing kinds of sexuality has been replaced by aggressive promotion of LGBT agenda with the result that it is quite common for teenagers nowadays to be seriously worried that they might be heterosexual!

Therapy that does not have a sound, analytical basis, is liable to do as much harm as good if the therapist has no deep understanding of themselves to inform their work. Increasingly, teachers, social workers and health professionals take refuge in buzzwords and acronyms that simply serve the purpose of excusing them from having to think about anything or understand, while giving the impression that they do. For example, Meta reported that the mental health team she was referred to had diagnosed her as having a Borderline Personality Disorder. I could hardly imagine anyone to whom this diagnosis was less appropriate or inaccurate.

Perhaps what this highlights the way in which psychoanalysis provides the possibility of having an experience of good parents and good family life, the only way through which the essential ingredients of relationships can be developed. This is something which cannot be supplied by drugs (prescribed or illegal), reading books or attending workshops, but requires committed, personal involvement and time for growth.